It is common for user interface design and development tools to make use of a “property grid” to provide a user one place to look for the properties of selected objects. Via such a property grid the user can inspect the values of properties and edit properties as appropriate. While such a property grid allows the user to easily discover where a property can be edited, there are often so many properties that the user must spend time finding the particular property that he wants to inspect or edit.
Some property grids attempt to mitigate this problem by providing two views of the property grid: a first view that is categorized such that, if the user can find the category for the property he wants to edit, then the number of properties that they have to search is reduced to only those in the category; and a second view that is arranged alphabetically by property name, allowing the user to search visually if he knows the name of the property.
There are several issues with this approach. First, the user can only effectively search the categorized view if he knows how to categorize the property for which he is looking in the same way that the creators of the categorization did. For this reason most users tend to use a property grid in the alphabetically sorted view. But in the alphabetically sorted view the user must first know the name of the property and then visually search a long list of entries to find the property for which they are looking. This adds overhead or cognitive load to every operation the user wishes to perform in the property grid.